The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Madness is one of the luxuries of age,” Orson replied. “You yourself may find some reserves as yet untapped, Shiverick.”

  Hugh laughed. Leo had lifted one of the scarves to peek at a painting and Sam gave his hand a playful slap. Orson came in carrying a tray of drinks.

  “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” he toasted, and the men lifted their glasses.

  “Come, come, Vita, join us!” Orson said.

  “But it’s…” She reached for a drink, a pink one.

  “Is that a cosmo?” Sam asked suddenly.

  Orson looked puzzled.

  “Because she is sixteen years old.”

  Orson blinked very rapidly and removed a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket to make a further inspection. Once they were in place on his nose he said, “Oh! I see. And so, you don’t want the cosmo?”

  “Well, it’s kind of… not… legal.” She redid her hair quickly, pulling the ponytail tighter, and scrunched back into the couch, her sweatshirt sleeves down over her hands. “But, I…”

  Leo glanced at her with sympathy. “She’s not a cosmo kind of girl, Orson. Do you have… root beer?”

  “Root beer?” Orson sounded as if he pictured witches brewing something in a forest.

  “Orange juice?”

  “Yes, I do have orange juice.”

  “Thank you,” Vita managed to say, though only the “thank” was audible. Last night Bumble had slept behind her bent knees, edging her over until she nearly fell out of bed, and she had dragged herself up this morning feeling sick because she hadn’t slept, and she was afraid of the geometry test, and… oh, to crawl back there! A cat that was too cuddly and fifteen equations in black ink on crisp paper with the answers to be revealed, clear and absolute, the next day? She should thank the gods for such problems! She pushed herself back into the arm of Orson’s sofa, tucking her feet up underneath, an anxiousness beating its wings so furiously in her chest that she had to keep herself rigid to contain it. The black loneliness of life—that was the only truth. Sleeping curled up with Bumble, LaRee in the next room… It had never been real, just a moment’s calm before the next abyss.

  “How did you two ever find each other?” Orson asked Sam and Leo. Hugh was examining the bookshelves, his head crooked to the side so as to read the titles on the spines. She had become invisible, or very near it. And none of them knew about Vinny. Or if they did, they had thought it over for a minute or two and gone on to the next thing. They didn’t blame her, or feel sorry for her, or anything. It just wasn’t very important to them.

  “Pizza,” Leo said, with a sweet little smile. “I was working at Pizza by the Sea and Sam came in for a slice.”

  “What bliss.”

  “Actually it was kind of hot,” Leo said. “Those wood-burning ovens.”

  “Those blue eyes…” Orson said.

  “They’re green!” Leo jumped up to look in the mirror.

  “They’re more reflective than most eyes,” Sam said. “They change, like cats’ eyes.”

  “Really?” Leo angled back and forth to try to find the effect in the mirror.

  “Oh my God, you are shameless,” Sam said. “Handsome is as handsome does. Didn’t your mother ever say that?”

  “She couldn’t tear her eyes off me,” Leo ruminated, causing Sam to cast his eyes skyward. “Well, she couldn’t!” Leo said. “I think I’ve wrecked it all with this hair, though. It’s too blond-tastic, don’t you think?”

  “It highlights your…” Orson began, and then decided words were not equal to the task. “Oh, really, I could just breathe you in. Both of you. Sam, I mean you no slight.”

  “Oh, gosh, of course not.” Sam was not as easily self-admiring as Leo.… No one was except maybe Scarlett O’Hara. And Sam was really the handsome one, Vita thought. His mouth was very red, his hair curled, and he did not raise his voice to make his point but softened it, so it was so tender you had to listen to it, the way you had to watch a quiet snowfall. Then Leo smiled at him and Vita changed her mind and decided he was handsomer.

  “Now, these morels come from Winsome Farm, up in Harwich,” Orson said, putting pasta into bowls. “You can make a perfectly silken sauce if you start with the right broth.…”

  “How wonderful, you serve morels,” Hugh said. “I didn’t know you had any.”

  “I don’t have any of my own,” Orson replied, delighted. “This is why we are so lucky to have an organic farm nearby.” They went on happily, playing pickup sticks with the conversation, each line lifted delicately from the last. They asked nothing and Vita watched and listened like a child at her parents’ feet.

  “Ah, linguine, little tongues.”

  “Do you like mushrooms, Vita?” This was Leo, breaking through her invisible wall.

  “Not really,” she croaked.

  “An im-morel pasta for Vita Gray!” Orson said. “Speaking of beauty…”

  Vita shrank, if that was possible.

  “No reason to blush, dear. Our Leo here would never blush.”

  “I do blush!” Leo said. “Don’t I?”

  “Come here, my punkin,” Sam said. “Do you remember when you were sixteen?”

  “Ugh. High school—don’t remind me. My voice didn’t change till I was a senior. Of course that was the first sign of my vocal range.…”

  Sam laughed. “What I remember is the art of the hanging wedgie. Not giving them, obviously, but surviving them with some shred of dignity.”

  “They had hanging wedgies back then?” Vita asked.

  “It’s hard to know which came first,” Orson said. “Underwear or hanging wedgies…”

  “It wasn’t that long ago, you know,” Sam said stiffly. “I’m only twenty-five.”

  “You?” Vita asked. He was as ageless as Apollo! She could not imagine there had ever been anyone who didn’t bow down before him.

  They sat around Orson’s little wicker coffee table with their plates in their laps, but Orson stood now and drew himself up. He was not much more than five feet tall, even though he was wearing stilettos. Except for a few white whiskers here and there, he was bald, and plump in a way that worked, with the heels, to give him the step of a middle-aged woman, so that Vita expected to see apron ties around his waist as he walked away. He carried himself with fragile dignity, as if he had learned he must demand respect or be trod under every foot that passed. Vita tried to angle her head the way he did and found herself feeling embattled, but brave.

  “I suppose you think I escaped this sort of thing because I was beneath notice,” he said. “In fact, I stuttered.” He stopped to let the majestic implications sink in. “Thus did I develop the fine diction for which I am celebrated town-wide.”

  Hugh laughed, as if nostalgic. “They hadn’t invented school shootings back then, or I suppose I’d be in prison.”

  “All of you?” Vita asked. “But you’re…”

  “Even I’m surprised,” Orson said. “I’d have imagined Leo at least would have been exempt from such earthly trials. And Sam, you would have experienced cruelty in the interest of art only.”

  Sam smiled, and Vita felt her blush rising again. She felt as attuned to him as if she were a mirror. What she knew of sex appalled her; she would never understand how people forced themselves to do it. But this physical telepathy came naturally, and with it a kind of hallucinatory bliss no drug could match. She imagined sleeping beside Leo, between him and Sam, so their feelings had to pass through her… and she’d better stop imagining anything because every thought she had seemed to telegraph itself across her face.

  “You’re the coolest people I know,” she admitted.

  “Of course we are,” Leo said. “I used to call them the rhinos, those guys,” he said. “Leathery, and plodding, but they had this big horn in the middle of their face that meant they didn’t have much to be afraid of.”

  Orson nodded. “The lumpen teenage masses have little talent save a strange, primitive ability to sense potential in other
s. And snuff it out.”

  “Really?” Vita asked.

  “Take you, for instance. A young woman, full of thought and feeling, her very uncertainty proof of a fine-grained consciousness… not likely to meet with great success in high school. You’re absolutely right to go about in disguise now.”

  “I’m not in disguise!”

  They were making fun of her. Well, everyone did; what had she expected? She took another bite of the pasta. Hers had none of the mushroom sauce, only butter, but it was still somehow better than LaRee’s pasta. She ate an olive out of the salad. Outside the pointed window the new birch leaves moved softly under the streetlight. The conversation had split; Orson and Hugh were talking about how to light the locust grove during the third act, while Sam and Leo practiced following each other’s facial expressions for the sake of looking into each other’s eyes. They were masters at the billion infinitesimal changes a mouth could register, and the range of intensities conveyed in a glance. Finally Sam laid his head on Leo’s shoulder and Leo leaned down and kissed his mouth.

  Watching them, Orson lost his ability to listen to Hugh, who found he had only Vita to talk to.

  “And what do you intend to do with the rest of your life, young woman?” he asked.

  “Me?” Ugh. She didn’t want to answer. He would laugh at the aspirations of such an awkward girl. Shyanne was moving to Los Angeles after graduation, to get a start in the film business. Vita had heard Hugh saying every move Shyanne made was a sexual invitation; she seemed to come from a different, and much more valued, species than Vita did.

  “I’m going to be an actor,” she said, and it sounded like a threat. She knew she was going to get a lecture now about how this was the dream of a little girl, that she had better learn to wait tables and stand in endless lines at cattle calls… and all the reflexive condescension that adults couldn’t seem to stop themselves from. She supposed it felt good to them, their own dreams having dribbled away. At least that gave them the right to a certain kind of superiority. Someday when she was playing an adult she would remember this. She ought to pay attention, to learn the world-weary intonation.

  But Hugh was listening, gravely.

  “Why?”

  “I like acting.” She still sounded surly and teenagerish, a sound she hated. “I like imagining myself as another person in another world.”

  A smile spread over his face and he leaned back in his chair. “That makes sense,” he said.

  “It’s so cool when you’re just thinking—how would this person stand, or how would she react to something… and you realize something about the character and then you understand something else and you’re thinking about the whole history, the way Shakespeare might have been thinking.…” She trailed off into self-consciousness. “Sorry, I’m just… prattling.”

  He peered at her, listening with care. “I’m not sure you can prattle and use the word prattle at the same time,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I came to Shakespeare as an English student. It was all reading, knowing… amassing an arsenal of interpretations, footnotes, allusions, so you would have more of them than the next man and win the contest. And of course there was always a contest, with whoever sat next to you in class or whose essay was published in the same anthology with yours.”

  She was puzzling through his words. “I mean,” he said, “that I like your perspective.”

  This was a gift and she was unsure how to accept it. She couldn’t think. “When do we build Caliban’s hut?”

  “It has to be soon,” Hugh said. “Franco is taking me out to Barrel Point next week—apparently there’s an eddy out there and a good bit of driftwood has collected on the shore. He’s going to build a basic structure and we’ll attach the wood. That… stump… you brought will go beside the opening. Then we’ll string lights through the locust grove, and put them on several switches so the goddess Iris can turn them on after she enters, at the opening of the show.”

  Sam and Leo emerged from their dream, and Orson blinked and sniffed, coming back to reality.

  “So you will be stepping out of your disguise,” Orson said.

  “No,” she said.

  “You’ll wear a costume that reveals you. Shows your beauty.”

  “I don’t care about beauty.”

  “You care about Shakespeare.”

  “That’s different,” she said stubbornly.

  “It’s funny,” Sam said. “When I play a woman I always feel like a goddess. It’s a feeling you just never have as a man. You’re at the center of the universe and everyone is looking up at you, and you smile over them with love, and…”

  “Pavlova?” Orson asked.

  “No!” she said. “No! Just an actor, who goes to work in a different story every day. It’s not that I want to have everyone looking at me. It’s that I want to be invisible, inside somebody else!”

  “I was merely asking whether you wanted some dessert.”

  “What?” she asked, mortified.

  “Pavlova? Meringue and strawberries? And whipped cream?”

  “Oh.”

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  “Thanks, I’d love some,” she said, too embarrassed to look up.

  “I never thought of it that way. You really don’t want everyone looking at you?” Leo said.

  “Do I seem like a person who likes to be looked at?” she said, still staring at the floor.

  “Do I seem like a person who likes to be looked at?” Leo asked.

  “We weren’t talking about you,” Sam said. “Vita,” he said, “you know you’re a pretty girl, right?”

  She made a miserable shrug. “I suppose.”

  “Come here. Sit down beside me.” She did, and he hooked his finger through the elastic and pulled it from her hair, so the ponytail escaped into a big puff of curls.

  “You see?” she said, grabbing it and doing it in two quick braids.

  “And the glasses need to come off, too. Sam, is the makeup case in the car?”

  “Backseat,” Sam said.

  “Anyone else? Pavlova?”

  “The thing is, you want to be more than beautiful,” Hugh continued, “to use your talent to show more depth in your characters… more truth.”

  “Yes! Yes, exactly!” Vita said. She looked up, without thinking, and they were all there, smiling, welcoming her into their odd brotherhood. All these kind faces, these bright, avid eyes watching her. Orson was holding the Pavlova, a big meringue peaked and swirled like a circus tent and covered with berries and cream.

  “There, beauty!” Sam said. “It’s right there in that smile!”

  “You’re a little like me,” Leo said. He was back with the makeup, dusting a brush against a palette, paying her the greatest compliment he knew.

  “How?” she asked. He was electric onstage. There always seemed to be a spotlight on him, wherever he went.

  “Cheekbones, I guess,” he said, stepping back.

  “She is exactly like me,” Sam said softly, intent on his project, looking straight into her eyes. “She is nothing like you at all.”

  “And Prosecco, of course.” Orson handed tall, narrow glasses around.

  “None for her,” Sam said. “We are not going to totally corrupt this child.”

  “She’s sixteen. She probably drinks more than we do!”

  She shook her head.

  “I daresay she can manage a few sips of Prosecco, for the sake of a toast,” Orson said.

  She took the glass. Tears were welling and her throat closed. She was an orphan, but they were taking her in. The Prosecco was bubbly and medicinal. She sipped dutifully, in order to belong. And then again.

  “And that is quite enough for any sister of mine,” Leo said. Which was good because she was drunk on her two sips, utterly giddy, the room spinning, and around it all of her life spinning, past and present and, well, future. What might happen? Who might she become? LaRee must be worried about her. She should call, or… Sam was d
oing her hair now, twisting it curl by curl around his finger, singing, “I put a little more mascara on,” more or less to himself.

  “There,” he said, opening a compact so she could see herself in the mirror, transformed. “What do you think? Or, wait.” He snapped the compact shut again. “For God’s sake, this sweatshirt… And I’m not taking it over your head after I just did your makeup. You’ve got something on underneath? Okay, so… Orson, do you have scissors?”

  He cut the sweatshirt up the front, and pulled it off as if she were a child, leaving her in her Outer Cape High T-shirt.“Try this,” Orson said, offering her a little jacket-like thing, peach-colored silk with a soft ruffle all around and a bow to tie the neck. “It was my mother’s,” he explained. “I keep it for certain occasions.”

  “There.” The mirror was proffered again; she hardly dared look.

  “I…” There she was. She, Vita Gray. The curls weren’t heavy, they bounced, and the awful frizz she got when she brushed it was gone. She had expected to come out looking like Shyanne, but she did not, not at all. Her face was brighter, her features sharper; she was more herself. “I…”

  “Don’t thank me, girl, I just couldn’t help myself,” Sam said. “Look, this took me two minutes!” he crowed to the others as if Vita had nothing to do with it at all. For this she would always love him.

  “When I think of what it must have been, for you two to find each other… your first glance, your first recognition, first…” Orson continued about his worship, while Sam and Leo made small gestures of humility, and other small gestures: Leo kissing Sam’s fingertips, for instance, showing off.

  “When I was young, of course, such a… tenderness… was inconceivable. We felt a responsibility to be furtive, to move in an atmosphere of shame. We rather… loved it. We would never have looked in each other’s eyes.”

  Leo and Sam looked directly, liquidly, into each other’s eyes—

  a kindness to Orson.

  “Let’s play flapdragon!” Leo said. “You have some brandy, Orson?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I certainly do!”

  Flapdragon, apparently, was a game from Shakespeare’s time, in which participants vied to eat raisins from a flaming bowl of brandy, and Sam and Leo played with spirit while Orson said things like, “Singed my whiskers!” and “Vita, keep back!”